Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement

On the basis of extensive fieldwork and research, Yavuz will offer a theoretically guided and empirically rooted narrative of alternative Islamic forms of modernity by focusing on Turkey and the Gülen movement.
The talk will examine the interplay between ideology, faith, and socioeconomic and political factors in fostering pathways to specific forms of modernity and development. He will argue that the Gülen movement represents not only an alternative Islamic form of modernity but also a force to recast the boundary between state and society; the self and community; and between reason and revelation. By tracing the movement’s historical and social development, Yavuz will examine how a marginalized and persecuted pietistic community evolved into a major transnational religious and social reform movement with the aim of fostering an Islamic Enlightenment.

M.Hakan Yavuz is a professor of political science at the University of Utah. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in the Middle East, the Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan, and the Balkans, examining the relationship between Islam and nationalism and the preservation and dissemination of Islamic knowledge under socialism. He is an author of more than 40 articles on Islam, Islamic modernity, nationalism, Kurdish and Armenian questions, and modern Turkish politics. His most recent book is Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for Research on Social Change.